This application claims priority to U.S. Provisional Patent Application No. 60/240,032 filed Oct. 12, 2000 entitled, ADDING META-DATA TO EXISTING WEB PAGES BY MEANS OF A PROXY SERVER.
In addition, this application is related to co-pending U.S. Application No. 09/797,491, filed Mar. 1, 2001, entitled, CLIENT-BASED OBJECTIFYING OF TEXT PAGES commonly assigned and hereby incorporated by reference for all purposes.
The World Wide Web is an integrated network of sites, each website is specialized in a different subject or theme. Despite the differences, most sites can be categorized into groups based upon their content. Some sites specialize in news, some in sports, others in book e-tailing and still others in investment.
Hypertext pages viewed over the World Wide Web are free-form text documents. They are not self-descriptive in the way that they do not contain the meaning of the displayed text. It is up to the reader of the site to interpret the text into meaningful information. This all works well for a human reader. However, a machine reading this text (data) is lacking the necessary descriptors to understand what is being displayed.
Therefore, it would be advantageous to provide a method of analyzing the unstructured data of text pages, understanding the data behind it and storing this data back into the original text page by means of a proxy. The data may be stored, hidden from the user's view, so that it is unobtrusive. However, applications that know where to look for this data can easily access and utilize it.